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| Rivets! Still messing around with the colors, but you get the idea. |
I discovered the cloner function in Cinema which lets you duplicate an object along the edge lines or vertices of an object. Perfect! But I immediately ran into problems because I had used a patch sphere for the body. (A patch sphere is when you start with a cube and smooth it so much that it goes round. They are good for 3D printing because true spheres tend to have pinched geometry at the poles.) The problem with the patch sphere is that the edge lines are not perfectly parallel and straight going around the object. You can see me figuring this out at the beginning of the video.
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| Patch sphere on left, regular sphere on right. Both have ridiculous poly counts in order to make a point. |
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| Even with this much smoothing, notice the pinched pole on the sphere (on right, may need to enlarge to see). Patch sphere looks good but is not perfectly round and will cause issues in my case. |
What I had to do was use a true sphere that I stretched out to match my original body as much as possible and applied the cloner tool to that. This allowed me to lay out the rivests in the right arc and oriented properly but they were still off. I basically had to adjust most of them by hand as the video below demonstrates. (It's been compressed down from about 3 hours).
The end result was worth it since the rivets look sweet.
Here's what you will see below:
- Figuring out that the patch sphere won't work
- Making a stand in from a true sphere
- Using the path tool (which is sweet) to select the edges I want rivets on. The red part indicates the removable panel so I didn't accidentally place rivets on a seam.
- Applying the cloner function which duplicates the selected object and then orienting it correctly.
- Lots and lots and lots of adjusting rivets.
Stop watching after about 4 minutes unless you like watching paint dry. Quicktime was being fussy and wouldn't let me trim the end off the video.
